The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)

Miss Handler must have been raised in the bosom of
saints. Even though the old man was utterly incompetent
with regards to the rudiments of writing and speaking, the
teacher was never less than polite and indulgent. The
entire class—the schoolhouse was full on Saturday
mornings—shifted at their desks while the old man
sputtered and choked on the day’s lessons. The two girls in
front of Cora made cross-eyes at each other and giggled at
his botched sounds.

Cora joined the class in exasperation. It was nigh
impossible to understand Howard’s speech under normal
circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African
tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told
her, that half language was the voice of the plantation.
They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and
spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the
ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to
erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words
except for the ones locked away by those who still
remembered who they had been before. “They keep ’em hid
like precious gold,” Mabel said.

These were not her mother’s and grandmother’s times.
Howard’s attempts at “I am” consumed precious lesson
time, already too short after the work week. She had come
here to learn.

A gust sent the shutters wheezing on their hinges. Miss
Handler put down her chalk. “In North Carolina,” she said,
“what we are doing is a crime. I would be fined a hundred
dollars and you would receive thirty-nine lashes. That’s
from the law. Your master would likely have a more severe
punishment.” The woman met Cora’s eyes. The teacher was
only a few years older than her but she made Cora feel like

an ignorant pickaninny. “It’s hard to start from nothing. A
few weeks ago, some of you were where Howard is now. It
takes time. And patience.”

She dismissed them. Chastened, Cora snatched up her
things, wishing to be the first one out the door. Howard
wiped his tears with his sleeve.

The schoolhouse lay south of the rows of girls’
dormitories. The building was also used for meetings in
need of a more serious atmosphere than that of the
common rooms, Cora noticed, such as the assemblies on
hygiene and feminine matters. It looked out on the green,
the colored population’s park. Tonight one of the bands
from the men’s dormitory was playing in the gazebo for the
social.

They deserved Miss Handler’s scolding. South Carolina
maintained a different attitude toward colored progress, as
Sam had told Cora on the platform. Cora had savored this
fact in a multitude of ways over the months, but the
provision for colored education was among the most
nourishing. Connelly once put out a slave’s eyes for looking
at words. He lost Jacob’s labor, though if the man had been
talented the overseer would have subjected him to a less
drastic punishment. In return he gained the eternal fear of
any slave with a notion to learn his letters.

Don’t need eyes to shuck corn, Connelly told them. Or
to starve yourself to death, as Jacob did presently.

She put the plantation behind her. She did not live
there anymore.

A page slipped out of her primer and she chased it onto
the grass. The book was falling apart, from her use and
that of the previous owners. Cora had seen little children,
ones younger than Maisie, use the same primer for their
lessons. New copies with fresh spines. The ones from the
colored schoolhouse were well-thumbed and she had to
squeeze her letters above and in between other people’s

scribblings, but there was no whipping attached just for
looking at it.

Her mother would be proud of her. As Lovey’s mother
was likely proud of her daughter for running away, for a
day and a half. Cora replaced the page in her book. She
pushed the plantation from her again. She was getting
better at it. Her mind was wily though, twisty. Thoughts she
did not like wormed in from the sides, from beneath,
through the cracks, from places she had battened down.

Of her mother, for example. Her third week in the
dormitory, she knocked on the door of Miss Lucy’s office. If
the government kept records of all the colored arrivals,
perhaps among the many names was that of her mother.
Mabel’s life after her escape was an enigma. It was
possible she was one of the freemen who came to South
Carolina for the opportunities.

Miss Lucy worked in a room down the hallway from
number 18’s common room. Cora did not trust her, yet
there she stood. Miss Lucy admitted her. The office was
cramped, with filing cabinets the proctor had to squeeze
through to get to her desk, but she kept it pleasant with
samplers on the walls detailing farming scenes. There was
no room for a second chair. Visitors stood for their
audience, which kept the visits short.

Miss Lucy regarded Cora over her glasses. “What’s her
name?”

“Mabel Randall.”

“Your name is Carpenter,” Miss Lucy said.

“That my daddy’s name. My mother, she a Randall.”

“That is,” Miss Lucy said. “She is.”

She stooped before one of the cabinets and ran her
fingers over the blue-tinted papers, glancing in Cora’s
direction every so often. Miss Lucy had mentioned that she
lived with a group of proctors in a boardinghouse near the

square. Cora tried to picture what the woman did when she
was not managing the dormitory, how she spent her
Sundays. Did she have a young gentleman who took her
places? How did an unattached white woman occupy
herself in South Carolina? Cora was getting braver but still
stuck close to the dormitories when not attending to the
Andersons. It seemed prudent, those early days out of the
tunnel.

Miss Lucy moved to another cabinet, tugging open a
series of drawers, but came up empty. “These records are
only of who’s here at our dormitories,” she said. “But we
have locations all over the state.” The proctor wrote down
her mother’s name and promised to check the master
records in the Griffin Building. For the second time she
reminded Cora of the lessons in reading and writing, which
were optional but recommended, in keeping with their
mission of colored uplift, especially for those with aptitude.
Then Miss Lucy returned to her work.

It had been a whim. Once Mabel ran, Cora thought of
her as little as possible. After landing in South Carolina,
she realized that she had banished her mother not from
sadness but from rage. She hated her. Having tasted
freedom’s bounty, it was incomprehensible to Cora that
Mabel had abandoned her to that hell. A child. Her
company would have made the escape more difficult, but
Cora hadn’t been a baby. If she could pick cotton, she could
run. She would have died in that place, after untold
brutalities, if Caesar had not come along. In the train, in
the deathless tunnel, she had finally asked him why he
brought her with him. Caesar said, “Because I knew you
could do it.”

How she hated her. The nights without number she
spent up in the miserable loft, tossing about, kicking the
woman next to her, devising ways off the plantation.
Sneaking into a cartload of cotton and leaping to the road

outside New Orleans. Bribing an overseer with her favors.
Taking her hatchet and running through the swamp as her
wretched mother had done. All the sleepless nights. In the
light of morning she convinced herself that her scheming
had been a dream. Those were not her thoughts, not at all.
Because to walk around with that in your mind and do
nothing was to die.

She didn’t know where her mother had fled. Mabel
hadn’t spent her freedom saving money to buy her
daughter out of bondage, that was certain. Randall would
not have allowed it, but nonetheless. Miss Lucy never did
find her mother’s name in her files. If she had, Cora would
have walked up to Mabel and knocked her flat.

“Bessie—you all right with yourself?”

It was Abigail from number 6, who came by for supper
occasionally. She was friendly with the girls who worked on
Montgomery Street. Cora had been standing in the middle
of the grass, staring. She told Abigail everything was fine
and returned to the dormitory to do her chores. Yes, Cora
needed to keep better guard over her thoughts.

If Cora’s own mask was occasionally askew, she proved
adept at maintaining the disguise of Bessie Carpenter, late
of North Carolina. She had prepared herself for Miss Lucy’s
question about her mother’s surname and for other tracks
the conversation might have taken. The interview at the
Placement Office that first day had concluded after a few
brief questions. The newcomers had toiled either in the
house or in the field. In either case, the majority of the
openings were domestic work. The families were told to
exercise forbearance with inexperienced help.

The doctor’s examination gave her a scare, but not on
account of the questions. The gleaming steel instruments in
the examination room looked like tools Terrance Randall
might have ordered from the blacksmith for sinister
purposes.

The doctor’s offices were on the tenth floor of the
Griffin. She survived the shock of her first elevator ride and
stepped into a long corridor lined with chairs, all of which
were full of colored men and women awaiting
examinations. After a nurse in a stark white uniform
checked her name off a list, Cora joined the group of
women. The nervous talk was understandable; for most,
this was their first visit with a doctor. On the Randall
plantation, the doctor was only called when the slave
remedies, the roots and salves, had failed and a valued
hand was near death. In most cases there was nothing for
the doctor to do at that point but complain about the
muddy roads and receive his payment.

They called her name. The window in the examination
room granted her a view of the configuration of the town
and the verdant countryside for miles and miles. That men
had built such a thing as this, a stepping-stone to heaven.
She might have stayed there all day, gazing at the
landscape, but the examination cut short her reverie. Dr.
Campbell was an efficient sort, a portly gentleman who
buzzed around the room with his white coat flapping
behind him like a cape. He probed about her general health
as his young nurse recorded it all on blue paper. From
which tribe did her ancestors originate and what did she
know of their constitutions? Had she ever been sick? How
was the condition of her heart, her lungs? She realized the
headaches she had suffered since Terrance’s blows had
disappeared since she came to South Carolina.

The intelligence test was brief, consisting of playing
with wooden shapes and a series of illustrated quizzes. She
undressed for the physical examination. Dr. Campbell
looked at her hands. They had softened but were still those
of one who had worked the fields. His fingers traced the
scars from her whippings. Hazarding a guess as to the
number of lashes, he was off by two. He examined her

privates with his tools. The exam was painful and made her
ashamed, the doctor’s cold attitude doing nothing to ease
her discomfort. Cora answered his questions about the
assault. Dr. Campbell turned to the nurse and she wrote
down his speculations over her ability to mother a child.

A collection of imposing metal instruments lay on a
nearby tray. He picked up one of the most terrifying, a thin
spike attached to a glass cylinder. “We’re going to take
some blood,” he said.

“What for?”

“Blood tells us a lot,” the doctor said. “About diseases.
How they spread. Blood research is the frontier.” The nurse
grabbed Cora’s arm and Dr. Campbell stabbed the needle
in. This explained the howls she had heard in the hall
outside. She made her own contribution. Then she was
done. In the hall, only the men remained. The chairs were
full.

That was her last visit to the tenth floor of the building.
Once the new hospital opened, Mrs. Anderson told her one
day, the offices of the government doctors were relocating.
The floor was already fully leased, Mr. Anderson added.
Mrs. Anderson’s own doctor ran his practice on Main
Street, above the optician. He sounded like a capable man.
In the months that Cora had worked for the family, the
mother’s bad days had markedly reduced in number. The
tantrums, the afternoons she spent locked in her room with
the drapes shut, her severe manner with the children
occurred less frequently. Spending more time outside the
house, and the pills, had worked wonders.

When Cora finished her Saturday washing and had
supper, it was almost time for the social. She put on her
new blue dress. It was the prettiest one at the colored
emporium. She shopped there as little as possible on
account of the markup. From shopping for Mrs. Anderson,
she was horrified that things in their local establishment

cost two or three times as much as those in the white
stores. As for the dress, it had cost a week’s wages and she
was forced to use scrip. She had been careful about her
spending for the most part. Money was new and
unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased. Some of the
girls owed months of wages and resorted to scrip for
everything now. Cora understood why—after the town
deducted for food, housing, and miscellany like upkeep on
the dormitories and schoolbooks, there was little left. Best
to rely on scrip’s credit sparingly. The dress was a one-time
affair, Cora assured herself.

The girls in the bunk room were in a state of great
excitement over the evening’s gathering. Cora was no
exception. She finished primping. Perhaps Caesar was
already on the green.

He waited on one of the benches affording a view of the
gazebo and the musicians. He knew she was not going to
dance. From across the green, Caesar seemed older than
he had in his Georgia days. She recognized his evening
clothes from the stacks in the colored emporium, but he
wore them with more confidence than other men his age
who hailed from plantations. The factory work agreed with
him. As well as the other elements of their improved
circumstances, of course. In the week since they last saw
each other, he had cultivated a mustache.

Then she saw the flowers. She complimented him on
the bouquet and thanked him. He complimented her on her
dress. He had tried to kiss her a month after they emerged
from the tunnel. She pretended it didn’t happen and since
then he had joined this performance. One day they would
address it. Maybe at that time she would kiss him, she
didn’t know.

“I know them,” Caesar said. He pointed at the band as
they took their places. “I think they might even be better
than George and Wesley.”

Cora and Caesar grew more casual about referring to
Randall in public as the months passed. Much of what they
said could apply to any former slave who overheard them.
A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s
misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their
universality. In any event, the music would soon cover their
talk of the underground railroad. Cora hoped the musicians
wouldn’t think them rude for their inattention. It was
unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel
was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody
without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of
their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

The proctors arranged the socials to foster healthy
relations between colored men and women, and to undo
some of the damage to their personalities wrought by
slavery. By their reckoning, the music and dancing, the food
and punch, all unfolding on the green in the flickering
lantern light, were a tonic for the battered soul. For Caesar
and Cora it was one of their few opportunities to catch each
other up.

Caesar worked in the machine factory outside town and
his changing schedule rarely overlapped with hers. He
liked the work. Every week the factory assembled a
different machine, determined by the volume of orders. The
men arranged themselves before the conveyor belt and
each was responsible for attaching his assigned component
to the shape moving down the line. At the start of the belt
there was nothing, a pile of waiting parts, and when the
last man was finished, the result lay before them, whole. It
was unexpectedly fulfilling, Caesar said, to witness the
complete product, in contrast to the disembodied toil on
Randall.

The work was monotonous but not taxing; the changing
products helped with the tedium. The lengthy rest breaks
were well distributed throughout the shift, arranged

according to a labor theorist often quoted by the foremen
and managers. The other men were fine fellows. Some still
bore the marks of plantation behavior, eager to redress
perceived slights and acting as if they still lived under the
yoke of reduced resources, but these men improved every
week, fortified by the possibilities of their new lives.

The former fugitives traded news. Maisie lost a tooth.
This week the factory manufactured locomotive engines—
Caesar wondered whether they would one day be used by
the underground railroad. The prices at the emporium had
gone up again, he observed. This was not news to Cora.

“How is Sam?” Cora asked. It was easier for Caesar to
meet with the station agent.

“In his usual temper—cheerful for no reason you can
tell. One of the louts at the tavern gave him a black eye.
He’s proud of it. Says he’d always wanted one.”

“And the other?”

He crossed his hands on his thighs. “There’s a train in a
few days. If we want to take it.” He said that last part as if
he knew her attitude.

“Perhaps the next one.”

“Yes, maybe the next one.”

Three trains had passed through since the pair arrived.
The first time they talked for hours over whether it was
wiser to depart the dark south immediately or see what
else South Carolina had to offer. By then they had gained a
few pounds, earned wages, and begun to forget the daily
sting of the plantation. But there had been real debate,
with Cora agitating for the train and Caesar arguing for the
local potential. Sam was no help—he was fond of his
birthplace and an advocate of South Carolina’s evolution on
matters of race. He didn’t know how the experiment would
turn out, and he came from a long line of rabble-rousers

distrustful of the government, but Sam was hopeful. They
stayed. Maybe the next one.

The next one came and went with a shorter discussion.
Cora had just finished a splendid meal in her dormitory.
Caesar had bought a new shirt. The thought of starving
again on the run was not attractive, nor was the prospect of
leaving behind the things they had purchased with their
toil. The third train came and went, and now this fourth one
would, too.

“Maybe we should stay for good,” Cora said.

Caesar was silent. It was a beautiful night. As he
promised, the musicians were very talented and played the
rags that had made everyone happy at previous socials. The
fiddler came from this or that plantation, the banjo man
from another state: Every day the musicians in the
dormitories shared the melodies from their regions and the
body of music grew. The audience contributed dances from
their own plantations and copied each other in the circles.
The breeze cooled them when they broke away to rest and
flirt. Then they started in again, laughing and clapping
hands.

“Maybe we should stay,” Caesar repeated. It was
decided.

The social ended at midnight. The musicians put out a
hat for donations, but most people were deep in scrip by
Saturday night so it remained empty. Cora said good night
to Caesar and was on her way home when she witnessed an
incident.

The woman ran through the green near the
schoolhouse. She was in her twenties, of slender build, and
her hair stuck up wildly. Her blouse was open to her navel,
revealing her breasts. For an instant, Cora was back on
Randall and about to be educated in another atrocity.

Two men grabbed the woman and, as gently as they
could, stopped her flailing. A crowd gathered. One girl
went to fetch the proctors from over by the schoolhouse.
Cora shouldered her way in. The woman blubbered
incoherently and then said suddenly, “My babies, they’re
taking away my babies!”

The onlookers sighed at the familiar refrain. They had
heard it so many times in plantation life, the lament of the
mother over her tormented offspring. Cora remembered
Caesar’s words about the men at the factory who were
haunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the
miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to
abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.

The woman calmed down somewhat and was led back
to the dormitory at the very rear of the line. Despite the
comfort brought by their decision to stay, it was a long
night for Cora as her thoughts returned to the woman’s
screams, and the ghosts she called her own.

“Will I be able to say goodbye? To the Andersons and
the children?” Cora asked.

Miss Lucy was sure that could be arranged. The family
was fond of her, she said.

“Did I do a bad job?” Cora thought she had made a fine
adjustment to the more delicate rhythms of domestic work.
She ran her thumb across the pads of her fingers. They
were so soft now.

“You did a splendid job, Bessie,” Miss Lucy said. “That’s
why when this new placement came up, we thought of you.
It was my idea and Miss Handler seconded it. The museum
needs a special kind of girl,” she said, “and not many of the
residents have adapted as well as you have. You should
take it as a compliment.”

Cora was reassured but lingered in the doorway.

“Anything else, Bessie?” Miss Lucy asked, squaring her
papers.

Two days after the incident at the social, Cora was still
troubled. She asked after the screaming woman.

Miss Lucy nodded in sympathy. “You’re referring to
Gertrude,” she said. “I know it was upsetting. She’s fine.
They’re keeping her in bed for a few days until she’s herself
again.” Miss Lucy explained that there was a nurse on hand
checking on her. “That’s why we reserved that dormitory
for residents with nervous disorders. It doesn’t make sense
for them to mix with the larger population. In number 40,
they can get the care they require.”

“I didn’t know 40 was special,” Cora said. “It’s your
Hob.”

“I’m sorry?” Miss Lucy asked, but Cora didn’t
elaborate. “They’re only there for a short time,” the white

woman added. “We’re optimistic.”

Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the
other girls that night if they were familiar with the word.
None of them had heard it before. She decided that it
meant trying.

The walk to the museum was the same route she took
to the Andersons’, until she turned right at the courthouse.
The prospect of leaving the family made her sorrowful. She
had little contact with the father, as he left the house early
and his office window was one of those in the Griffin that
stayed lit the latest. Cotton had made him a slave, too. But
Mrs. Anderson had been a patient employer, especially
after her doctor’s prescriptions, and the children were
pleasant. Maisie was ten. By that age on the Randall
plantation all the joy was ground out. One day a pickaninny
was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in
between they had been introduced to a new reality of
bondage. Maisie was spoiled, doubtless, but there were
worse things than being spoiled if you were colored. The
little girl made Cora wonder what her own children might
be like one day.

She’d seen the Museum of Natural Wonders many
times on her strolls but never knew what the squat
limestone building was for. It occupied an entire block.
Statues of lions guarded the long flat steps, seeming to
gaze thirstily at the large fountain. Once Cora walked into
its influence, the sound of the splashing water dampened
the street noise, lifting her into the auspices of the
museum.

Inside, she was taken through a door that was off-limits
to the public and led into a maze of hallways. Through half-
opened doors, Cora glimpsed curious activities. A man put
a needle and thread to a dead badger. Another held up
yellow stones to a bright light. In a room full of long
wooden tables and apparatus she saw her first

microscopes. They squatted on the tables like black frogs.
Then she was introduced to Mr. Field, the curator of Living
History.

“You’ll do perfectly,” he said, scrutinizing her as the
men in the rooms had scrutinized the projects on their
worktables. His speech at all times was quick and
energetic, without a trace of the south. She later
discovered that Mr. Fields had been hired from a museum
in Boston to update the local practices. “Been eating better
since you came, I see,” he said. “To be expected, but you’ll
do fine.”

“I start cleaning in here first, Mr. Fields?” Cora had
decided on the way over that in her new position she would
avoid the cadences of plantation speech the best she could.

“Cleaning? Oh, no. You know what we do here—” He
stopped. “Have you been here before?” He explained the
business of museums. In this one, the focus was on
American history—for a young nation, there was so much to
educate the public about. The untamed flora and fauna of
the North American continent, the minerals and other
splendors of the world beneath their feet. Some people
never left the counties where they were born, he said. Like
a railroad, the museum permitted them to see the rest of
the country beyond their small experience, from Florida to
Maine to the western frontier. And to see its people.
“People like you,” Mr. Fields said.

Cora worked in three rooms. That first day, gray drapes
covered the large glass windows that separated them from
the public. The next morning the drapes were gone and the
crowds arrived.

The first room was Scenes from Darkest Africa. A hut
dominated the exhibit, its walls wooden poles lashed
together under a peaked thatch roof. Cora retreated into its
shadows when she needed a break from the faces. There
was a cooking fire, the flames represented by shards of red

glass; a small, roughly made bench; and assorted tools,
gourds, and shells. Three large black birds hung from the
ceiling on a wire. The intended effect was that of a flock
circling over the activity of the natives. They reminded
Cora of the buzzards that chewed the flesh of the
plantation dead when they were put on display.

The soothing blue walls of Life on the Slave Ship
evoked the Atlantic sky. Here Cora stalked a section of a
frigate’s deck, around the mast, various small barrels, and
coils of rope. Her African costume was a colorful wrap; her
sailor outfit made her look like a street rascal, with a tunic,
trousers, and leather boots. The story of the African boy
went that after he came aboard, he helped out on deck with
various small tasks, a kind of apprentice. Cora tucked her
hair under the red cap. A statue of a sailor leaned against
the gunwale, spyglass pointed. The eyes, mouth, and skin
color were painted on its wax head in disturbing hues.

Typical Day on the Plantation allowed her to sit at a
spinning wheel and rest her feet, the seat as sure as her old
block of sugar maple. Chickens stuffed with sawdust
pecked at the ground; from time to time Cora tossed
imaginary seed at them. She had numerous suspicions
about the accuracy of the African and ship scenes but was
an authority in this room. She shared her critique. Mr.
Fields did concede that spinning wheels were not often
used outdoors, at the foot of a slave’s cabin, but countered
that while authenticity was their watchword, the
dimensions of the room forced certain concessions. Would
that he could fit an entire field of cotton in the display and
had the budget for a dozen actors to work it. One day
perhaps.

Cora’s criticism did not extend to Typical Day’s
wardrobe, which was made of coarse, authentic negro
cloth. She burned with shame twice a day when she
stripped and got into her costume.

Mr. Fields had the budget for three actors, or types as
he referred to them. Also recruited from Miss Handler’s
schoolhouse, Isis and Betty were similar in age and build to
Cora. They shared costumes. On their breaks, the three
discussed the merits and disadvantages of their new
positions. Mr. Fields let them be, after a day or two of
adjustments. Betty liked that he never showed his temper,
as opposed to the family she had just worked for, who were
generally nice but there was always the possibility of a
misunderstanding or a bad mood that was none of her
doing. Isis enjoyed not having to speak. She hailed from a
small farm where she was often left to her own devices,
save on those nights when the master needed company and
she was forced to drink the cup of vice. Cora missed the
white stores and their abundant shelves, but she still had
her evening walks home, and her game with the changing
window displays.

On the other hand, ignoring the museum visitors was a
prodigious undertaking. The children banged on the glass
and pointed at the types in a disrespectful fashion, startling
them as they pretended to fuss with sailor’s knots. The
patrons sometimes yelled things at their pantomimes,
comments that the girls couldn’t make out but that gave
every indication of rude suggestions. The types rotated
through the exhibits every hour to ease the monotony of
pretending to swab the deck, carve hunting tools, and
fondle the wooden yams. If Mr. Fields had one constant
instruction, it was that they not sit so much, but he didn’t
press it. They teased Skipper John, as they nicknamed the
dummy sailor, from their stools as they fiddled with the
hemp rope.

—

THE exhibits opened the same day as the hospital, part
of a celebration trumpeting the town’s recent

accomplishments. The new mayor had been elected on the
progress ticket and wanted to ensure that the residents
associated him with his predecessor’s forward-looking
initiatives, which had been implemented while he was still
a property lawyer in the Griffin Building. Cora did not
attend the festivities, although she saw the glorious
fireworks that night from the dormitory window and got to
see the hospital up close when her checkup came around.
As the colored residents settled into South Carolina life, the
doctors monitored their physical well-being with as much
dedication as the proctors who took measure of their
emotional adjustments. Some day, Miss Lucy told Cora one
afternoon while they walked the green, all the numbers and
figures and notes would make a great contribution to their
understanding of colored life.

From the front, the hospital was a smart, sprawling
single-floor complex that seemed as long as the Griffin
Building was tall. It was stark and unadorned in its
construction in a way Cora had never seen before, as if to
announce its efficiency in its very walls. The colored
entrance was around the side but apart from that was
identical to the white entrance, in the original design and
not an afterthought, as was so often the case.

The colored wing was having a busy morning when
Cora gave her name to the receptionist. A group of men,
some of whom she recognized from socials and afternoons
on the green, filled the adjacent room while they waited for
their blood treatments. She hadn’t heard of blood trouble
before arriving in South Carolina, but it afflicted a great
number of the men in the dormitories and was the source
of tremendous effort on the part of the town doctors. The
specialists had their own section it seemed, the patients
disappearing down a long hall when their name was called.

She saw a different physician this time, one more
pleasant than Dr. Campbell. His name was Stevens. He was

a northerner, with black curls that verged on womanish, an
effect he tempered with his carefully tended beard. Dr.
Stevens seemed young for a doctor. Cora took his
precociousness as a tribute to his talents. As she moved
through the examination, Cora got the impression she was
being conveyed on a belt, like one of Caesar’s products,
tended down the line with care and diligence.

The physical examination was not as extensive as the
first. He consulted the records from her previous visit and
added his own notes on blue paper. In between he asked
her about dormitory life. “Sounds efficient,” Dr. Stevens
said. He declared the museum work “an intriguing public
service.”

After she dressed, Dr. Stevens pulled over a wooden
stool. His manner remained light as he said, “You’ve had
intimate relations. Have you considered birth control?”

He smiled. South Carolina was in the midst of a large
public health program, Dr. Stevens explained, to educate
folks about a new surgical technique wherein the tubes
inside a woman were severed to prevent the growth of a
baby. The procedure was simple, permanent, and without
risk. The new hospital was specially equipped, and Dr.
Stevens himself had studied under the man who pioneered
the technique, which had been perfected on the colored
inmates of a Boston asylum. Teaching the surgery to local
doctors and offering its gift to the colored population was
part of the reason he was hired.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“The choice is yours, of course,” the doctor said. “As of
this week, it is mandatory for some in the state. Colored
women who have already birthed more than two children,
in the name of population control. Imbeciles and the
otherwise mentally unfit, for obvious reasons. Habitual
criminals. But that doesn’t apply to you, Bessie. Those are

women who already have enough burdens. This is just a
chance for you to take control over your own destiny.”

She wasn’t his first recalcitrant patient. Dr. Stevens put
the matter aside without losing his warm demeanor. Her
proctor had more information about the program, he told
Cora, and was available to talk about any concern.

She walked down the hospital corridor briskly, hungry
for air. Cora had become too accustomed to escaping
unscathed from encounters with white authority. The
directness of his questions and his subsequent elaborations
threw her. To compare what had happened the night of the
smokehouse with what passed between a man and his wife
who were in love. Dr. Stevens’s speech made them the
same. Her stomach twisted at the idea. Then there was the
matter of mandatory, which sounded as if the women, these
Hob women with different faces, had no say. Like they were
property that the doctors could do with as they pleased.
Mrs. Anderson suffered black moods. Did that make her
unfit? Was her doctor offering her the same proposal? No.

As she turned these thoughts over, she found herself in
front of the Andersons’ house. Her feet took over when her
mind was elsewhere. Perhaps underneath, Cora was
thinking about children. Maisie would be at school, but
Raymond might be home. She had been too busy the last
two weeks to make a proper goodbye.

The girl who opened the door looked at Cora with
suspicion, even after she explained who she was.

“I thought her name was Bessie,” the girl said. She was
skinny and small, but she held on to the door as if more
than happy to throw her weight against it to keep out
intruders. “You said you was Cora.”

Cora cursed the doctor’s distraction. She explained that
her master named her Bessie, but in the quarter everyone
called her Cora because she looked so much like her
mother.

“Mrs. Anderson is not at home,” the girl said. “And the
children are playing with they friends. You best come back
when she’s home.” She shut the door.

For once, Cora took the shortcut home. Talking to
Caesar would have helped, but he was at the factory. She
lay in her bed until supper. From that day on, she took a
route to the museum that avoided the Anderson home.

Two weeks later Mr. Fields decided to give his types a
proper tour of the museum. Isis and Betty’s time behind the
glass had improved their acting skills. The duo affected a
plausible interest as Mr. Fields held forth on the cross-
sections of pumpkins and the life rings of venerable white
oaks, the cracked-open geodes with their purple crystals
like glass teeth, the tiny beetles and ants the scientists had
preserved with a special compound. The girls chuckled at
the stuffed wolverine’s frozen smile, the red-tailed hawk
caught mid-dive, and the lumbering black bear that
charged the window. Predators captured in the moment
they went in for the kill.

Cora stared at the wax faces of the white people. Mr.
Fields’s types were the only living exhibits. The whites
were made of plaster, wire, and paint. In one window, two
pilgrims in thick wool breeches and doublets pointed at
Plymouth rock while their fellow voyagers looked on from
ships in the mural. Delivered to safety after the hazardous
passage to a new beginning. In another window, the
museum arranged a harbor scene, where white colonists
dressed like Mohawk Indians hurled crates of tea over the
side of the ship with exaggerated glee. People wore
different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn’t
hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore
costumes to deny blame.

The types walked before the displays like paying
customers. Two determined explorers posed on a ridge and
gazed at the mountains of the west, the mysterious country

with its perils and discoveries before them. Who knew what
lay out there? They were masters of their lives, lighting out
fearlessly into their futures.

In the final window, a red Indian received a piece of
parchment from three white men who stood in noble
postures, their hands open in gestures of negotiation.

“What’s that?” Isis asked.

“That’s a real tepee,” Mr. Fields said. “We like to tell a
story in each one, to illuminate the American experience.
Everyone knows the truth of the historic encounter, but to
see it before you—”

“They sleep in there?” Isis said.

He explained. And with that, the girls returned to their
own windows.

“What do you say, Skipper John,” Cora asked her fellow
sailor. “Is this the truth of our historic encounter?” She had
lately taken to making conversation with the dummy to add
some theater for the audience. Paint had flaked from his
cheek, exposing the gray wax beneath.

The stuffed coyotes on their stands did not lie, Cora
supposed. And the anthills and the rocks told the truth of
themselves. But the white exhibits contained as many
inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora’s three habitats.
There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and
earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The
enterprising African boy whose fine leather boots she wore
would have been chained belowdecks, swabbing his body in
his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread,
yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over
dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle.
But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the
world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the
white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very
moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window,

sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a
shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t
looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to
escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen
had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves,
they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the
Declaration of Independence back on the Randall
plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village
like an angry phantom. She didn’t understand the words,
most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on
her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either,
if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched
away what belonged to other people, whether it was
something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or
something you could not, like freedom. The land she tilled
and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men
bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they
killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the
crib.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine
that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the
surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the
whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open
and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do
when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future.
Torture them as much as you can when they are on this
earth, then take away the hope that one day their people
will have it better.

“Ain’t that right, Skipper John?” Cora asked.
Sometimes, if Cora turned her head fast, it looked as if the
thing were winking at her.

A few nights later, she noticed the lights in number 40
were out, even though it was early in the evening. She

asked the other girls. “They were moved to the hospital,”
one said. “So they can get better.”

The night before Ridgeway put an end to South
Carolina, Cora lingered on the roof of the Griffin Building,
trying to see where she had come from. There was an hour
until her meeting with Caesar and Sam and she didn’t
relish the idea of fretting on her bed, listening to the
chirping of the other girls. Last Saturday after school, one
of the men who worked in the Griffin, a former tobacco
hand named Martin, told her that the door to the roof was
unlocked. Access was easy. If Cora worried about one of the
white people who worked on the twelfth floor questioning
her when she got off the elevator, Martin told her, she could
take the stairs for the final flights.

This was her second twilight visit. The height made her
giddy. She wanted to jump up and snatch the gray clouds
roiling overhead. Miss Handler had taught the class about
the Great Pyramids in Egypt and the marvels the slaves
made with their hands and sweat. Were the pyramids as tall
as this building, did the pharaohs sit on top and take the
measure of their kingdoms, to see how diminished the
world became when you gained the proper distance? On
Main Street below workmen erected three- and four-story
buildings, taller than the old line of two-floor
establishments. Cora walked by the construction every day.
Nothing as big as the Griffin yet, but one day the building
would have brothers and sisters, striding over the land.
Whenever she let her dreams take her down hopeful
avenues, this notion stirred her, that of the town coming
into its own.

To the east side of the Griffin were the white people’s
houses and their new projects—the expanded town square,
the hospital, and the museum. Cora crossed to the west,
where the colored dormitories lay. From this height, the red
boxes crept up on the uncleared woods in impressive rows.

Is that where she would live one day? A small cottage on a
street they hadn’t laid yet? Putting the boy and the girl to
sleep upstairs. Cora tried to see the face of the man,
conjure the names of the children. Her imagination failed
her. She squinted south toward Randall. What did she
expect to see? The night took the south into darkness.

And north? Perhaps she would visit one day.

The breeze made her shiver and she headed for the
street. It was safe to go to Sam’s now.

Caesar didn’t know why the station agent wanted to
see them. Sam had signaled as he passed the saloon and
told him, “Tonight.” Cora had not returned to the railroad
station since her arrival, but the day of her deliverance was
so vivid she had no trouble finding the road. The animal
noises in the dark forest, the branches snapping and
singing, reminded her of their flight, and then of Lovey
disappearing into the night.

She walked faster when the light from Sam’s windows
fluttered through the branches. Sam embraced her with his
usual enthusiasm, his shirt damp and reeking with spirits.
She had been too distracted to notice the house’s disarray
on her previous visit, the grimed plates, sawdust, and piles
of clothes. To get to the kitchen she had to step over an
upturned toolbox, its contents jumbled on the floor, nails
fanned like pick-up-sticks. Before she left, she would
recommend he contact the Placement Office for a girl.

Caesar had already arrived and sipped a bottle of ale at
the kitchen table. He’d brought one of his bowls for Sam
and ran his fingers over its bottom as if testing an
imperceptible fissure. Cora had almost forgotten he liked to
work with wood. She had not seen much of him lately. He
had bought more fancy clothes from the colored emporium,
she noted with pleasure, a dark suit that fit him well.
Someone had taught him how to tie a tie, or perhaps that
was a token of his time in Virginia, when he had believed

the old white woman would free him and he had worked on
his appearance.

“Is there a train coming in?” Cora asked.

“In a few days,” Sam said.

Caesar and Cora shifted in their seats.

“I know you don’t want to take it,” Sam said. “It’s no
matter.”

“We decided to stay,” Caesar said.

“We wanted to make sure before we told you,” Cora
added.

Sam huffed and leaned back in the creaky chair. “It
made me happy to see you skipping the trains and making
a go of things here,” the station agent said. “But you may
reconsider after my story.”

Sam offered them some sweetmeats—he was a faithful
customer of Ideal Bakery off Main Street—and revealed his
purpose. “I want to warn you away from Red’s,” Sam said.

“You scared of the competition?” Caesar joked. There
was no question on that front. Sam’s saloon did not serve
colored patrons. No, Red’s had exclusive claim to the
residents of the dormitories with a hankering for drink and
dance. It didn’t hurt that they took scrip.

“More sinister,” Sam said. “I’m not sure what to make
of it, to be honest.” It was a strange story. Caleb, the owner
of the Drift, possessed a notoriously sour disposition; Sam
had a reputation as the barkeep who enjoyed conversation.
“You get to know the real life of a place, working there,”
Sam liked to say. One of Sam’s regulars was a doctor by the
name of Bertram, a recent hospital hire. He didn’t mix
socially with the other northerners, preferring the
atmosphere and salty company at the Drift. He had a thirst
for whiskey. “To drown out his sins,” Sam said.

On a typical night, Bertram kept his thoughts close
until his third drink, when the whiskey unstoppered him

and he rambled animatedly about Massachusetts blizzards,
medical-school hazing rituals, or the relative intelligence of
Virginia opossum. His discourse the previous evening had
turned to female companionship, Sam said. The doctor was
a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball’s establishment,
preferring it to the Lanchester House, whose girls had a
saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from
Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.

“Sam?” Cora said.

“I’m sorry, Cora.” He abridged. Dr. Bertram
enumerated some of the virtues of Miss Trumball’s, and
then added, “Whatever you do, man, keep out of Red’s
Café, if you have a taste for nigger gals.” Several of his
male patients frequented the saloon, carrying on with the
female patrons. His patients believed they were being
treated for blood ailments. The tonics the hospital
administered, however, were merely sugar water. In fact,
the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and
tertiary stages of syphilis.

“They think you’re helping them?” Sam asked the
doctor. He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.

“It’s important research,” Bertram informed him.
“Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of
infection, and we approach a cure.” Red’s was the only
colored saloon in the town proper; the proprietor got a
break on the rent for a watchful eye. The syphilis program
was one of many studies and experiments under way at the
colored wing of the hospital. Did Sam know that the Igbo
tribe of the African continent is predisposed to nervous
disorders? Suicide and black moods? The doctor recounted
the story of forty slaves, shackled together on a ship, who
jumped overboard en masse rather than live in bondage.
The kind of mind that could conceive of and execute such a
fantastic course! What if we performed adjustments to the
niggers’ breeding patterns and removed those of

melancholic tendency? Managed other attitudes, such as
sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect
our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which
Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern
white men.

The doctor leaned in. Had Sam read the newspaper
today?

Sam shook his head and topped off the man’s drink.

Still, the barkeep must have seen the editorials over
the years, the doctor insisted, expressing anxiety over this
very topic. America has imported and bred so many
Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered.
For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With
strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in
time—we could free them from bondage without fear that
they’d butcher us in our sleep. The architects of the
Jamaica uprisings had been of Beninese and Congolese
extraction, willful and cunning. What if we tempered those
bloodlines carefully over time? The data collected on the
colored pilgrims and their descendants over years and
decades, the doctor said, will prove one of the boldest
scientific enterprises in history. Controlled sterilization,
research into communicable diseases, the perfection of new
surgical techniques on the socially unfit—was it any wonder
the best medical talents in the country were flocking to
South Carolina?

A group of rowdies stumbled in and crowded Bertram
to the end of the bar. Sam was occupied. The doctor drank
quietly for a time and then slipped out. “You two are not
the sort that goes to Red’s,” Sam said, “but I wanted you to
know.”

“Red’s,” Cora said. “This is more than the saloon, Sam.
We have to tell them they’re being lied to. They’re sick.”

Caesar was in agreement.

“Will they believe you over their white doctors?” Sam
asked. “With what proof? There is no authority to turn to
for redress—the town is paying for it all. And then there are
all the other towns where colored pilgrims have been
installed in the same system. This is not the only place with
a new hospital.”

They worked it out over the kitchen table. Was it
possible that not only the doctors but everyone who
ministered to the colored population was involved in this
incredible scheme? Steering the colored pilgrims down this
or that path, buying them from estates and the block in
order to conduct this experiment? All those white hands
working in concert, committing their facts and figures
down on blue paper. After Cora’s discussion with Dr.
Stevens, Miss Lucy had stopped her one morning on her
way to the museum. Had Cora given any thought to the
hospital’s birth control program? Perhaps Cora could talk
to some of the other girls about it, in words they could
understand. It would be very appreciated, the white woman
said. There were all sorts of new positions opening up in
town, opportunities for people who had proven their worth.

Cora thought back to the night she and Caesar decided
to stay, the screaming woman who wandered into the green
when the social came to an end. “They’re taking away my
babies.” The woman wasn’t lamenting an old plantation
injustice but a crime perpetrated here in South Carolina.
The doctors were stealing her babies from her, not her
former masters.

“They wanted to know what part of Africa my parents
hailed from,” Caesar said. “How was I to know? He said I
had the nose of a Beninese.”

“Nothing like flattery before they geld a fellow,” Sam
said.

“I have to tell Meg,” Caesar said. “Some of her friends
spend evenings at Red’s. I know they have a few men they

see there.”

“Who’s Meg?” Cora said.

“She’s a friend I’ve been spending time with.”

“I saw you walk down Main Street the other day,” Sam
said. “She’s very striking.”

“It was a nice afternoon,” Caesar said. He took a sip of
his beer, focusing on the black bottle and avoiding Cora’s
eyes.

They made little progress on a course of action,
struggling with the problem of whom to turn to and the
possible reaction from the other colored residents. Perhaps
they would prefer not to know, Caesar said. What were
these rumors compared to what they had been freed from?
What sort of calculation would their neighbors make,
weighing all the promises of their new circumstances
against the allegations and the truth of their own pasts?
According to the law, most of them were still property, their
names on pieces of paper in cabinets kept by the United
States Government. For the moment, warning people was
all they could do.

Cora and Caesar were almost to town when he said,
“Meg works for one of those Washington Street families.
One of those big houses you see?”

Cora said, “I’m glad you have friends.”

“You sure?”

“Were we wrong to stay?” Cora asked.

“Maybe this is where we were supposed to get off,”
Caesar said. “Maybe not. What would Lovey say?”

Cora had no answer. They didn’t speak again.

—

SHE slept poorly. In the eighty bunks the women snored
and shifted under their sheets. They had gone to bed

believing themselves free from white people’s control and
commands about what they should do and be. That they
managed their own affairs. But the women were still being
herded and domesticated. Not pure merchandise as
formerly but livestock: bred, neutered. Penned in
dormitories that were like coops or hutches.

In the morning, Cora went to her assigned work with
the rest of the girls. As she and the other types were about
to get dressed, Isis asked if she could switch rooms with
Cora. She was feeling poorly and wanted to rest at the
spinning wheel. “If I could just get off my feet for a bit.”

After six weeks at the museum, Cora hit upon a rotation
that suited her personality. If she started in Typical Day on
the Plantation, she could get her two plantation shifts
finished just after the midday meal. Cora hated the
ludicrous slave display and preferred to get it over as soon
as possible. The progression from Plantation to Slave Ship
to Darkest Africa generated a soothing logic. It was like
going back in time, an unwinding of America. Ending her
day in Scenes from Darkest Africa never failed to cast her
into a river of calm, the simple theater becoming more than
theater, a genuine refuge. But Cora agreed to Isis’s
request. She would end the day a slave.

In the fields, she was ever under the merciless eye of
the overseer or boss. “Bend your backs!” “Work that row!”
At the Andersons’, when Maisie was at school or with her
playmates and little Raymond was asleep, Cora worked
unmolested and unwatched. It was a small treasure in the
middle of the day. Her recent installation in the exhibition
returned her to the furrows of Georgia, the dumb, open-
jawed stares of the patrons stealing her back to a state of
display.

One day she decided to retaliate against a red-haired
white woman who scowled at the sight of Cora’s duties “at
sea.” Perhaps the woman had wed a seaman of incorrigible

appetites and hated the reminder—Cora didn’t know the
source of her animus, or care. The woman irked her. Cora
stared into her eyes, unwavering and fierce, until the
woman broke, fairly running from the glass toward the
agricultural section.

From then on Cora selected one patron per hour to evil-
eye. A young clerk ducking out from his desk in the Griffin,
a man of enterprise; a harried matron corralling an unruly
clutch of children; one of the sour youths who liked to
batter the glass and startle the types. Sometimes this one,
sometimes that one. She picked the weak links out from the
crowd, the ones who broke under her gaze. The weak link—
she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the
chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the
link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty
iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The
people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town
or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute
Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it,
chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it
might add up to something.

She got good at her evil eye. Looking up from the slave
wheel or the hut’s glass fire to pin a person in place like
one of the beetles or mites in the insect exhibits. They
always broke, the people, not expecting this weird attack,
staggering back or looking at the floor or forcing their
companions to pull them away. It was a fine lesson, Cora
thought, to learn that the slave, the African in your midst,
is looking at you, too.

The day Isis felt under the weather, during Cora’s
second rotation on the ship, she looked past the glass and
saw pigtailed Maisie, wearing one of the dresses Cora used
to wash and hang on the line. It was a school trip. Cora
recognized the boys and girls who accompanied her, even if
the children did not remember her as the Andersons’ old

girl. Maisie didn’t place her at first. Then Cora fixed her
with the evil eye and the girl knew. The teacher elaborated
on the meaning of the display, the other children pointed
and jeered at Skipper John’s garish smile—and Maisie’s
face twitched in fear. From the outside, no one could tell
what passed between them, just like when she and Blake
faced each other the day of the doghouse. Cora thought, I’ll
break you, too, Maisie, and she did, the little girl
scampering out of the frame. She didn’t know why she did
it, and was abashed until she took off her costume and
returned to the dormitory.

—

SHE called upon Miss Lucy that evening. Cora had been
figuring on Sam’s news all day, holding it up to the light
like a hideous bauble, tilting it so. The proctor had aided
Cora many times. Now her suggestions and advice
resembled maneuvers, the way a farmer tricks a donkey
into moving in line with his intentions.

The white woman was gathering a stack of her blue
papers when Cora poked her head into the office. Was her
name written down there, and what were the notes beside
it? No, she corrected: Bessie’s name, not hers.

“I only have a moment,” the proctor said.

“I saw people moving back into number 40,” Cora said.
“But no one who used to live there. Are they still in the
hospital for their treatment?”

Miss Lucy looked at her papers and stiffened. “They
were moved to another town,” she said. “We need room for
all the new arrivals, so women like Gertrude, the ones who
need help, are being sent to where they can get more
suitable attention.”

“They’re not coming back?”

“They are not.” Miss Lucy appraised her visitor. “It
troubles you, I know. You’re a smart girl, Bessie. I still hope
you’ll take on the mantle of leadership with the other girls,
even if you don’t think the operation is what you need right
now. You could be a true credit to your race if you put your
mind to it.”

“I can decide for myself,” Cora said. “Why can’t they?
On the plantation, master decided everything for us. I
thought we were done with that here.”

Miss Lucy recoiled from the comparison. “If you can’t
see the difference between good, upstanding people and
the mentally disturbed, with criminals and imbeciles,
you’re not the person I thought you were.”

I’m not the person you thought I was.

One of the proctors interrupted them, an older woman
named Roberta who often coordinated with the Placement
Office. She had placed Cora with the Andersons, those
months ago. “Lucy? They’re waiting on you.”

Miss Lucy grumbled. “I have them all right here,” Miss
Lucy told her colleague. “But the records in the Griffin are
the same. The Fugitive Slave Law says we have to hand
over runaways and not impede their capture—not drop
everything we’re doing just because some slave catcher
thinks he’s onto his bounty. We don’t harbor murderers.”
She rose, holding the stack of papers to her chest. “Bessie,
we’ll take this up tomorrow. Please think about our
discussion.”

Cora retreated to the bunkhouse stairs. She sat on the
third step. They could be looking for anyone. The
dormitories were full of runaways who’d taken refuge here,
in the wake of a recent escape from their chains or after
years of making a life for themselves elsewhere. They could
be looking for anyone.

They hunted murderers.

Cora went to Caesar’s dormitory first. She knew his
schedule but in her fright could not remember his shifts.
Outside, she didn’t see any white men, the rough sort she
imagined slave catchers to look like. She sprinted across
the green. The older man at the dormitory leered at her—
there was always a licentious implication when a girl
visited the men’s housing—and informed her that Caesar
was still at the factory. “You want to wait with me?” he
asked.

It was getting dark. She debated whether or not to risk
Main Street. The town records had her name as Bessie. The
sketches on the fliers Terrance had printed after their
escape were crudely drawn but resembled them enough
that any savvy hunter would look at her twice. There was
no way she would rest until she conferred with Caesar and
Sam. She took Elm Street, parallel to Main, until she
reached the Drift’s block. Each time she turned a corner,
she expected a posse on horses, with torches and muskets
and mean smiles. The Drift was full with early-evening
carousers, men she recognized and those she did not. She
had to pass by the saloon’s window twice before the station
agent saw her and motioned for her to come around back.

The men in the saloon laughed. She slipped through the
light cast in the alley from inside. The outhouse door was
ajar: empty. Sam stood in the shadows, his foot on a crate
as he laced his boots. “I was trying to figure out how to get
word,” he said. “The slave catcher’s name is Ridgeway.
He’s talking to the constable now, about you and Caesar.
I’ve been serving two of his men whiskey.”

He handed her a flier. It was one of the bulletins
Fletcher had described in his cottage, with one change.
Now that she knew her letters, the word murder hooked
her heart.

There was a ruckus from inside the bar and Cora
stepped farther into the shadows. Sam couldn’t leave for

another hour, he said. He’d gather as much information as
he could and try to intercept Caesar at the factory. It was
best if Cora went ahead to his house and waited.

She ran as she had not in a long time, sticking to the
side of the road and darting into the woods at the sound of
a traveler. She entered Sam’s cottage through the back
door and lit a candle in the kitchen. After pacing, unable to
sit, Cora did the only thing that calmed her. She had
cleaned all the dishware when Sam returned home.

“It’s bad,” the station agent said. “One of the bounty
hunters came in right after we spoke. Had a ring of ears
around his neck like a red Indian, a real tough character.
He told the others that they knew where you were. They
left to meet their man in front, Ridgeway.” He panted from
the run over. “I don’t know how, but they know who you
are.”

Cora had grabbed Caesar’s bowl. She turned it over in
her hands.

“They got a posse together,” Sam said. “I couldn’t get
to Caesar. He knows to come here or the saloon—we had a
plan. He may already be on his way.” Sam intended to
return to the Drift to wait for him.

“Do you think anyone saw us talking?”

“Maybe you should go down to the platform.”

They dragged the kitchen table and the thick gray rug.
Together they lifted the door in the floor—it was a tight fit
—and the musty air flickered the candles. She took some
food and a lantern and descended into the darkness. The
door closed above her and the table rumbled back into
place.

She had avoided the services at the colored churches in
town. Randall forbade religion on his plantation to
eliminate the distraction of deliverance, and churching
never interested her once she came to South Carolina. It

made her seem strange to the other colored residents, she
knew, but seeming strange had not bothered her for a long
time. Was she supposed to pray now? She sat at the table in
the thin lamplight. It was too dark on the platform to make
out where the tunnel began. How long would it take them
to root out Caesar? How fast could he run? She was aware
of the bargains people made in desperate situations. To
reduce the fever in a sick baby, to halt the brutalities of an
overseer, to deliver one from a host of slave hells. From
what she saw, the bargains never bore fruit. Sometimes the
fever subsided, but the plantation was always still there.
Cora did not pray.

She fell asleep waiting. Later, Cora crawled back up the
steps, perching just beneath the door, and listened. It might
be day or night in the world. She was hungry and thirsty.
She ate some of the bread and sausage. Moving up and
down the steps, putting her ear to the door and then
retreating after a time, she passed the hours. When she
finished the food, her despair was complete. She listened
by the door. There was not a sound.

The thundering above woke her, terminating the void. It
was not one person, or two, but many men. They ransacked
the house and shouted, knocking over cabinets and
upending furniture. The noise was loud and violent and so
near, she shrank down the steps. She could not make out
their words. Then they were done.

The seams in the door permitted no light and no draft.
She could not smell the smoke, but she heard the glass
shatter and the pop and crackle of the wood.

The house was on fire.

Stevens

THE Anatomy House of the Proctor Medical School was
three blocks away from the main building, second from last
on the dead-end street. The school wasn’t as discriminating
as the better-known medical colleges in Boston; the press
of acceptances necessitated an expansion. Aloysius Stevens
worked nights to satisfy the terms of his fellowship. In
exchange for tuition relief and a place to work—the late-
night shift was quiet and conducive to study—the school
got someone to admit the body snatcher.

Carpenter usually delivered just before dawn, before
the neighborhood roused, but tonight he called at midnight.
Stevens blew out the lamp in the dissection room and ran
up the stairs. He almost forgot his muffler, then
remembered how cold it had been last time, when autumn
crept in to remind them of the bitter season to come. It
rained that morning and he hoped it wouldn’t be too
muddy. He had one pair of brogues and the soles were in a
miserable state.

Carpenter and his man Cobb waited in the driver’s
seat. Stevens settled in the cart with the tools. He slid
down until they got a healthy distance away, in case any of
the faculty or students were about. It was late, but a bone
expert from Chicago had presented that night and they
might still be carousing in the local saloons. Stevens was
disappointed about missing the man’s talk—his fellowship
often prevented his attendance at guest lectures—but the
money would remove some of the sting. Most of the other
students came from well-off Massachusetts families, spared
worries over rent or food. When the cart passed McGinty’s
and he heard the laughter inside, Stevens pulled his hat
down.

Cobb leaned around. “Concord tonight,” he said, and
offered his flask. As a matter of policy Stevens declined
when Cobb shared his liquor. Though still in his studies he
was certain of various diagnoses he’d made about the state
of the man’s health. But the wind was brisk and mean and
they had hours in the dark and mud before the return to
the Anatomy House. Stevens took a long pull and choked
on fire. “What is this?”

“One of my cousin’s concoctions. Too strong for your
taste?” He and Carpenter chortled.

More likely he had collected last night’s dregs at the
saloon. Stevens took the prank in good cheer. Cobb had
warmed to Stevens over the months. He could imagine the
man’s complaints when Carpenter suggested that he stand
in whenever one of their gang was too besotted, or
incarcerated, or otherwise unavailable for their nocturnal
missions. Who’s to say this fancy rich boy could keep his
tongue? (Stevens was not rich and was fancy only in his
aspirations.) The city had started hanging grave robbers
lately—which was ironic or fitting depending on one’s
perspective, as the bodies of the hanged were given to
medical schools for dissection.

“Don’t mind the gallows,” Cobb had told Stevens. “It’s
quick enough. The people are the thing—it should be a
private viewing, if you ask me. Watching a man shit his
guts, it’s indecent.”

Digging up graves had fastened the bonds of
friendship. Now when Cobb called him Doctor, it was with
respect and not derision. “You’re not like that other sort,”
Cobb told him one night when they carried a cadaver
through the back door. “You’re a wee shady.”

That he was. It helped to be a wee disreputable when
you were a young surgeon, especially when it came to
materials for postmortem dissection. There had been a
body shortage ever since the study of anatomy came into

its own. The law, the jail, and the judge provided only so
many dead murderers and prostitutes. Yes, persons
afflicted with rare diseases and curious deformities sold
their bodies for study after their demise, and some doctors
donated their cadavers in the spirit of scientific inquiry, but
their numbers scarcely met the demand. The body game
was fierce, for buyers and sellers alike. Rich medical
schools outbid the less fortunate ones. Body snatchers
charged for the body, then added a retainer, then a delivery
fee. They raised prices at the start of the teaching period
when demand was high, only to offer bargains at the end of
the term when there was no longer a need for a specimen.

Morbid paradoxes confronted Stevens daily. His
profession worked to extend life while secretly hoping for
an increase in the deceased. A malpractice suit called you
before the judge for want of a skill, but get caught with an
ill-gotten cadaver and the judge punished you for trying to
obtain that skill. Proctor made its students pay for their
own pathological specimens. Stevens’s first anatomy course
required two complete dissections—how was he supposed
to pay for that? Back home in Maine, he’d been spoiled by
his mother’s cooking; the women on her side were gifted.
Here in the city, tuition, books, lectures, and rent had him
subsisting on crusts for days on end.

When Carpenter invited Stevens to work for him, he did
not hesitate. His appearance scared Stevens, that first
delivery months before. The grave robber was an Irish
giant, imposing in frame, uncouth in manner and speech,
and carried with him the reek of damp earth. Carpenter
and his wife had six children; when two of them passed
from yellow fever, he sold them for anatomical study. Or so
it was said. Stevens was too scared to ask for refutation.
When trafficking in cadavers, it helped to be immune to
sentimentality.

He wouldn’t be the first body snatcher to open a grave
to find the face of a long-lost cousin or a dear friend.

Carpenter recruited his gang at the saloon, rowdies all.
They slept the day, drank well into the evening, and then
set off for their pastime. “The hours are not great, but suit
a certain character.” Criminal character, incorrigible by any
measure. It was a low enterprise. Raiding cemeteries was
the least of it. The competition was a pack of rabid animals.
Leave a prospect to too late in the evening and you were
liable to discover someone else had pilfered the body first.
Carpenter reported his competition’s clients to the police,
broke into dissection rooms to mutilate their deliveries.
Brawls erupted when rival gangs converged on the same
pauper’s field. They smashed one another’s faces among
the tombstones. “It was raucous,” Carpenter always said
when he finished one of his stories, grinning through his
mossy teeth.

In his glory days, Carpenter elevated the ploys and
chicanery of his trade to a devilish art. He brought rocks in
wheelbarrows for undertakers to bury and carried away the
deceased. An actor taught his nieces and nephews to cry on
demand, the craft of bereavement. Then they made the
rounds of the morgue, claiming bodies as long-lost relatives
—although Carpenter was not above simply stealing bodies
from the coroner when he had to. On more than one
occasion, Carpenter sold a cadaver to an anatomical school,
reported the body to the police, and then had his wife,
dressed in mourning clothes, claim it as her son.
Whereupon Carpenter sold the body again to another
school. It saved the county the expense of burial; no one
looked too closely.

Eventually the body trade grew so reckless that
relatives took to holding graveside vigils, lest their loved
ones disappear in the night. Suddenly every missing child
was perceived to have been a victim of foul play—snatched,

dispatched, and then sold for dissection. The newspapers
took up the cause in outraged editorials; the law stepped
in. In this new climate, most body snatchers extended their
territory, riffling the graves of distant cemeteries to space
out their raids. Carpenter turned to niggers exclusively.

The niggers did not post sentries over their dead.
Niggers did not pound on the door of the sheriff, they did
not haunt the offices of the newspapermen. No sheriff paid
them any mind, no journalist listened to their stories. The
bodies of their loved ones disappeared into sacks and
reappeared in the cool cellars of medical schools to
relinquish their secrets. Every one of them a miracle, in
Stevens’s view, providing instruction into the intricacies of
God’s design.

Carpenter snarled when he said the word, a mangy dog
hoarding his bone: nigger. Stevens never used the word.
He disapproved of racial prejudice. Indeed, an uneducated
Irishman like Carpenter, steered by society to a life of
rummaging graves, had more in common with a negro than
a white doctor. If you considered the matter at length. He
wouldn’t say that aloud, of course. Sometimes Stevens
wondered if his views weren’t quaint, given the temper of
the modern world. The other students uttered the most
horrible things about the colored population of Boston,
about their smell, their intellectual deficiencies, their
primitive drives. Yet when his classmates put their blades
to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored
advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In
death the negro became a human being. Only then was he
the white man’s equal.

On the outskirts of Concord, they stopped at the small
wooden gate and waited for the custodian’s signal. The
man waved his lantern back and forth and Carpenter drove
the cart inside the cemetery. Cobb paid the man’s fee and
he directed them to this night’s bounty: two large, two

medium, and three infants. The rain had softened the earth.
They’d be done in three hours. After they refilled the
graves, it would be as if they were never there.

“Your surgeon’s knife.” Carpenter handed Stevens a
spade.

He’d be a medical student again in the morning.
Tonight he was a resurrection man. Body snatcher was an
accurate name. Resurrection man was a bit florid, but it
held a truth. He gave these people a second chance to
contribute, one denied them in their previous life.

And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens
thought from time to time, you could make a study of the
living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.

He rubbed his hands to stir the blood and started to
dig.

North Carolina

Runaway or conveyed off, From the subscriber’s residence, near
Henderson, on the 16th inst. a negro girl named MARTHA,
belonging to the Subscriber. Said girl is of a dark brown complexion,
slightly made, and very free spoken, about 21 years of age; she wore
a black silk bonnet with feathers; and had in her possession two
calico bed quiltings. I understand she will try to pass as a free girl.

RIGDON BANKS

GRANVILLE COUNTY, AUGUST 28, 1839

SHE lost the candles. One of the rats woke Cora with its
teeth and when she settled herself, she crawled across the
dirt of the platform in her search. She came up with
nothing. It was the day after Sam’s house collapsed, though
she couldn’t be sure. Best to measure time now with one of
the Randall plantation’s cotton scales, her hunger and fear
piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the
other in increments. The only way to know how long you
are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

By then Cora only needed the candlelight for company,
having collected the particulars of her prison. The platform
was twenty-eight paces long, and five and a half from wall
to tracks’ edge. It was twenty-six steps up to the world
above. The trapdoor was warm when she placed her palm
against it. She knew which step snagged her dress when
she crawled up (the eighth) and which liked to scrape her
skin if she scrabbled down too fast (the fifteenth). Cora
remembered seeing a broom in a corner of the platform.
She used it to tap the ground like the blind lady in town,
the way Caesar had probed the black water during their
flight. Then she got clumsy or cocky and fell onto the
tracks, losing both the broom and any desire beyond
huddling on the ground.

She had to get out. In those long hours, she could not
keep from devising cruel scenes, arranging her own
Museum of Terrible Wonders. Caesar strung up by the
grinning mob; Caesar a brutalized mess on the floor of the
slave catcher’s wagon, halfway back to Randall and the
waiting punishments. Kind Sam in jail; Sam tarred and
feathered, interrogated about the underground railroad,
broken-boned and senseless. A faceless white posse sifted
through the smoldering remains of the cabin, pulled up the
trapdoor and delivered her into wretchedness.

Those were the scenes she decorated in blood when
awake. In nightmares the exhibits were more grotesque.
She strolled back and forth before the glass, a customer of
pain. She was locked in Life on the Slave Ship after the
museum had closed, ever between ports and waiting for the
wind while hundreds of kidnapped souls screamed
belowdecks. Behind the next window, Miss Lucy cut open
Cora’s stomach with a letter opener and a thousand black
spiders spilled from her guts. Over and over, she was
transported back to the night of the smokehouse, held
down by nurses from the hospital as Terrance Randall
grunted and thrusted above her. Usually the rats or bugs
woke her when their curiosity became too much,
interrupting her dreams and returning her to the darkness
of the platform.

Her stomach quivered under her fingers. She had
starved before, when Connelly got it in his mind to punish
the quarter for mischief and cut off rations. But they
needed food to work and the cotton demanded the
punishment be brief. Here, there was no way to know when
she would eat next. The train was late. The night Sam told
them about the bad blood—when the house still stood—the
next train was due in two days. It should have arrived. She
didn’t know how late it was, but the delay signified nothing
good. Maybe this branch was shut down. The entire line
exposed and canceled. No one was coming. She was too
weak to walk the unknowable miles to the next station, in
the dark, let alone face whatever waited at the following
stop.

Caesar. If they had been sensible and kept running, she
and Caesar would be in the Free States. Why had they
believed that two lowly slaves deserved the bounty of South
Carolina? That a new life existed so close, just over the
state line? It was still the south, and the devil had long
nimble fingers. And then, after all the world had taught

them, not to recognize chains when they were snapped to
their wrists and ankles. The South Carolina chains were of
new manufacture—the keys and tumblers marked by
regional design—but accomplished the purpose of chains.
They had not traveled very far at all.

She could not see her own hand in front of her but saw
Caesar’s capture many times. Seized at his factory station,
snatched en route to meet Sam at the Drift. Walking down
Main Street, arm in arm with his girl Meg. Meg cries out
when they seize him, and they knock her to the sidewalk.
That was one thing that would be different if she had made
Caesar her lover: They might have been captured together.
They would not be alone in their separate prisons. Cora
drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around
them. In the end she would have disappointed him. She was
a stray after all. A stray not only in its plantation meaning—
orphaned, with no one to look after her—but in every other
sphere as well. Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off
the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the
family of people.

The earth trembled faintly. In days to come, when she
remembered the late train’s approach, she would not
associate the vibration with the locomotive but with the
furious arrival of a truth she had always known: She was a
stray in every sense. The last of her tribe.

The light of the train shuddered around the bend. Cora
reached for her hair before realizing that after her
interment there was no improving her appearance. The
engineer would not judge her; their secret enterprise was a
fraternity of odd souls. She waved her hands animatedly,
savoring the orange light as it expanded on the platform
like a warm bubble.

The train sped past the station and out of sight.

She almost keeled over into the tracks as she howled
after the train, her throat raspy and raw after days of